Book Information: Confessions of a Mask

This is the story of a boy's development towards homosexuality. As he progresses from a childhood spent largely in his grandmother's sickroom, through adolescence at a boy's school and at summer resorts, to young manhood during the war, and an abortive love affair with a classmate's sister, we realise that this is an account of youthful yearnings and loneliness which has its parallel in every civilized country.

Original title: 仮面の告白 (Kamen no Kokuhaku) [Confessions of a Mask]Original languages:
Japanese

Edition #1: Confessions of a Mask

"This agonising story of childhood and adolescence reports with a terrible honesty the inner life of a boy entranced by sado-masochistic fantasy. This leads to deep homosexual obsessions... for this is a haunting, hopeless tale, told without self-pity but with true art and with a desperate humour." The Times Literary Supplement

"Has the lonely dignity of a tree delicately sketched by a Japanese master; it describes its subject's unhappy condition without sentimentality, and his analysis of the psychology of the public after the disaster of Hiroshima would alone make the book worth reading." John Davenport—The Observer